Blessed could just be Western Canada’s hardest working band. The Abbotsford (a suburb of Vancouver) based quartet are getting ready to release their phenomenal new EP II on April 28th via Kingfisher Bluez (Canada) and Cointoss Records (US) and they are sharing first single “Headache” today with Stereogum. Blessed’s artful post-punk and twitchy indie rock sound has earned the band comparisons to everyone from Radiohead and Television to This Heat and Ought. The band’s songwriting is brilliantly locked in and carefully constructed. “Headache” is vibrant, angular, and incredibly focused, blending together influences from krautrock and post-punk to progressive rock and agitated art-pop.
Stereogum called the single, “a fidgety post-punk jamboree with chord strums that cut like sharp-edged corners and mimic the sound of angrily joggling a locked or jammed door. “Headache” also contains clear, jarring guitar lines, arpeggiated sequences convey euphoric urgency, and sporadic articulations of short phrases like “poor circulation” and “mass incorporation,” which could very well be the cause of the Vancouver quartet’s cranium irritation.”
Speaking about “Headache,” Drew Riekman (guitar/vocals) shared:
“I remember we were driving somewhere in Ontario when I was writing the lyrics on my phone. We had been driving for an immense amount of time, it may have been coming out of Northern Ontario which in my opinion is the worst drive in Canada, despite it’s beauty. If you’re not in the mood to be doing it, it can be grating. I was dealing with a general anxiety, a small headache, not enough water, passing by a bunch of identical houses and new developments entering southern Ontario. It was just sentence fragments that encapsulated a million tiny outside forces creating a single anxious feeling.”
Blessed’s self-titled debut earned praise from Stereogum, Noisey, Exclaim, and more, and the band played a whopping 91 shows throughout Canada and the US (which would have been 111 if not for visa troubles that derailed an East Coast tour). The band are showing no signs of slowing down either with a string of North American tour dates this Spring/Summer that stretches from May 5th to July 15th. Blessed are the type of band to play the road may lead them and the band are amazing audiences one show at a time.